A series installment that further develops its sturdy characters, but still leaves a bounty of curious subplots unresolved.
In the third entry in Mayers’ (Violet Sapphire, 2016, etc.) fantasy series, a woman who belongs to a line of shape-shifting Hindu demons tells a story to her half-human offspring.
In a letter to her daughter Supriya, Shanti Patel hopes to reveal her child’s rather unorthodox beginnings. Supriya already knows that her mother is a Rakshasa—a demon—but she knows little about her human father, who left the family before she was born. Shanti’s tale, continued from the previous novel, begins in 1961, when her first daughter, Neha, was born. Shanti, afraid that she couldn’t control her fire-generating ability, left Neha and Neha’s 5,000-year-old, immortal father, Vibhishana, in India. She went to live in San Francisco with her mom, Sabrina, and worked as a doctor. Neha, meanwhile, traveled the world pursuing various studies, including anthropology, and ultimately came to the conclusion that a visit to Venus could explain the genesis of the Rakshasas to her. Later, Shanti reunited with her family but soon endured a great tragedy. She went on to meet a human, Raghav Ramachandran, whom she thought could help her escape her years of despair. She had a love for Raghav, especially for his pure soul—something that’s atypical in humans and contrasted with Shanti’s perpetual battle against a “dark voice” that stoked her fiery anger (and fiery powers). But Raghav refused to accept what she truly was, leading to a decision that had potentially lethal consequences. Although Mayers dives right into this third installment, her meticulous prose will slowly ease readers into the series, whether they’re new or returning. Shanti is a complex protagonist who uses her demon skills for good (her ability to understand all languages, for example, allows her to communicate with all her patients), but she’s also burdened with human struggles, such as sexual harassment at work. The lengthy section on Shanti and Raghav’s relationship slows the pace considerably, but it does effectively explain the bizarre circumstances surrounding Supriya’s birth. However, Mayers’ mostly solid prose occasionally slips in redundant descriptions (“incredibly epic”). As this novel is inspired by the Indian narrative poem, the Ramayana, the author graciously closes it, like the preceding two, with a glossary of Hindu references.
A series installment that further develops its sturdy characters, but still leaves a bounty of curious subplots unresolved.Pub Date: June 3, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grass Roof Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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